Dietary Intake and Adequacy of Vitamin K¹

Sarah L. Booth^* and J. W. Suttie^,

^* Vitamin K Laboratory, U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, Tufts University, Boston, MA 02111 and  Department of Biochemistry, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706

The current daily recommended dietary allowance for vitamin K is 1 µg/kg. Reliable measurements of vitamin K content in foods are now available, and data from 11 studies of vitamin K intake indicate that the mean intake of young adults is ~80 µg phylloquinone/d and that older adults consume ~150 µg/d. The vitamin K concentration in most foods is very low (<10 µg/100 g), and the majority of the vitamin is obtained from a few leafy green vegetables and four vegetable oils (soybean, cottonseed, canola and olive) that contain high amounts. Limited data indicate that absorption of phylloquinone from a food matrix is poor. Hydrogenated oils also contain appreciable amounts of 2,3-dihydrophylloquinone of unknown physiological importance. Menaquinones absorbed from the diet or the gut appear to provide only a minor portion of the human daily requirement. Measures of the extent to which plasma prothrombin or serum osteocalcin lack essential -carboxyglutamic acid residues formed by vitamin K action, or the urinary excretion of this amino acid, provide more sensitive measures of vitamin K status than measures of plasma phylloquinone or insensitive clotting assays.

The Journal of Nutrition Vol. 128 No. 5 May 1998, pp. 785-788
Copyright ©1998 by the American Society for Nutritional Sciences

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